37 
AMERICA 
E MBROIDERY—Embroidery yarns, 
Tinsel—Tinsel art needle work, 
Non-curling gummed papers 
Glove-fitting corsets 
Venus Pencils— 
Sidourney tools and cocks and valves, 
Steel locks and safes and chains, 
Horse-cart reels and racks and wheels! 
Mason s materials 
Monumental memorials 
Invisible bi-focals— 
Loose wiles! 
Loo sew He s! ! 
MURIEL DRAPER 
EQUILIBRIUM 
£ i-i* nV ■ ; .\v *■% * 4^’ 
MAN OF LETTERS: "Don’t give your stuff to the Little Review." 
ABSENT-MINDED WOMAN comes back and gropes for words. 
M. L. “These little rags are no good, you know. They do no service to Literature, 
They boast of being non-commercial—and don’t pay their contributors. It’s a thoroughly 
rotten way of doing things.” 
A. W. drifting: “It’s their conscious deliberate freakishness that I dislike.” 
M. L. “They’re quite negligible. They have practically no circulation.” 
A. W. turns fully outwards in a reluctant death. “They do pay their contributors, 
what they can. That’s a good deal more, in proportion, than is paid by the commercia* 
press. And it isn’t the point Even if they didn’t. . . . Take the Little Review. 
What is the worst that can be said of it? That it is deliberately outre, and consistently 
vitriolic about a chimera it calls public taste. What is the best? That they give a chance 
to people the commercial press can’t handle. Take Joyce. He has been canonised by 
the Times Literary Supplement. And now everyone is marveling over ‘Ulysses’.” 
M. L. is silent. 
A. W. hurriedly. “You’re both right. It’s the Church and the heretics. But why 
must you curse each other? Why can’t you both see, for instance, that papers like the 
London Mercury whose business it is to safeguard the casket of tradition and keep the 
back windows open, must have their eyes at the backs of their heads and therefore 
can’t be expected to see what is under their noses? The literary squires have always 
thought the literary country is going to the dogs. They look for a repetition of the past. 
Their feet stumble among the stones of the fabric that is abuilding. The independent 
press has eyes for nothing but the new. It discovers gems, lying neglected in the mud. 
And cherishes them. Gathering up with them much dirt and rubble.” She pauses, 
reflecting that Saint Paul must have been unconsciously led to impose silence on women. 
If men are robbed of their partisanship before they are fifty, where are they? 
M. L. steers the conversation a little to one side. 
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON